#3. Kim Peek Remembers Everything

Dmadeo"Anyone up for a stirring monotone recitation of Finnegan's Wake?"

One reason he was able to put away so many books is that he could read them two pages at once, one page with each eye, because apparently that's something you can do. It is claimed Peek had an eidetic memory, or photographic memory, something that people aren't even sure actually exists. However, if it does exist, Peek is probably the best case for it, reportedly being able to recall 98 percent of everything he ever experienced in perfect detail. To compare, most of us can't recall 98 percent of the previous goddamned sentence.

Peek's story was also the inspiration for the film Rain Man. However, when someone asked Peek to read a book on gambling (which would have taken him about 30 minutes), he told them that using his powers for gambling would be "unethical."

In your face, Hoffman.

So What's Going on Here?

Many assumed Peek was, like the guy in the last entry, an autistic savant, because Americans think "autism" means "Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters." This wasn't the case; Peek's incredible ability is believed to have come from a congenital birth defect, which resulted in increased memory capacity. This is another way of saying he memorized everything, including the 12,000 books we mentioned earlier and sports statistics spanning decades. For a given person's hometown, he could tell you all highways leading to it, the county, area code and ZIP code, television stations available in the town, the name of the local telephone provider and any notable local history.

Throughout it all, Peek only wanted to share his gift with the world. His father and caretaker never accepted anything in exchange for Peek's appearances, except for the joy Kim felt when meeting other people. When Dustin Hoffman met him to research his role for Rain Man, he was quoted as saying, "I may be the star, but you are the heavens," presumably before Peek told him his future and levitated out of the room.

He has been dubbed "Iceman," because the Dutch have no imagination. Hof's ability is so great that even when submerged in freezing water that would pretty much kill a normal human in a few minutes, his body temperature barely drops, and when he climbed Everest (in bicycle shorts, we really can't stress that enough), he said it was easy.

So What's Going on Here?

Hof himself claims that his remarkable abilities come from meditation, which sounds like total hackneyed bullshit to us, as no amount of thinking can keep your flaccid penis from fusing to a block of ice.

The researchers stressed that Hof is an entirely unique case, and his ability to basically control his body and the way it reacts isn't something other people can learn or do unless accidentally exposed to gamma rays or a radioactive comet.

#1. Isao Machii Lives in the Matrix

Isao Machii is a Japanese man with superhuman reflexes, which he stereotypically uses to do all sorts of amazing tricks with a katana, including peeling an apple and cutting an Airsoft pellet in half in midair.

The following video is from a show that is very, very Japanese, but it showcases many of Machii's abilities quite well:

Here's the uncanny thing to consider -- Airsoft pellets travel at roughly 160 feet per second. That's too fast for the human eye to even register, let alone pinpoint in order to bisect with a goddamn sword.

So What's Going on Here?

Machii isn't seeing the pellet with his eyes: He's sensing it in some other way. Here's what clinical psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula has to say about him: "This is about processing at an entirely different sensory level, because he's not visually processing this. This is a different level of anticipatory processing ..."

We can all sort of do this, obviously -- catching a ball when somebody throws it to you requires you to anticipate where it's going. A baseball player, with practice, gets so good at it that he can hit a fastball coming in at 90 mph. But he's still doing it by sight -- years of practice have taught him that the trajectory of the ball can be predicted by how it looks leaving the pitcher's hand. The difference is that Machii's brain is wired so that he can hit things that are moving too fast to see.

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